Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Traditional Development Scenario

A useful way to describe Agile is by contrasting it with traditional development. To do that, let's consider a typical development scenario: adding new features to stay competitive. First we'll look at the scenario using traditional development and then using Agile development.

In a traditional project, you have a known timeframe for major releases. Too short and you’ll spend too much time on overhead, too long and you’ll miss opportunities. For the sake of argument, let’s pick a timeframe of six months and say that allows you to provide three “big features.” Marketing says the three features with the highest ROI are a Facebook plug-in, a Second Life plug-in, and an RSS feed plug-in.

Midway through the design process, marketing announces that the Second Life plug-in is not as marketable as they had hoped and iPhone support is showing signs of becoming very lucrative. You think, oh well, nothing we can do about that now. Just after you finish coding marketing declares that the Second Life plug-in is going to be a complete flop and when can they get iPhone support?

Now that the functionality has settled down, QA starts writing tests and running them. Planning and development took longer than expected and the release deadline is looming. Testing time is compressed, QA concentrates on the most critical stuff and gives the rest a spot check. Here’s a mystery. If your full test cycle takes two days, why does testing take a month? The answer is that you aren’t really doing a month of testing. Problems have been creeping in all along the way that you are just now finding out about and it takes many test/fix cycles to expose them and fix them. Once the find/fix rate gets down to an acceptable level, you declare victory and deliver the new release.